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Webb Telescope Detects Earliest Known Black Hole Merger

Astronomers observe two supermassive black holes merging just 740 million years after the Big Bang, providing new insights into early cosmic evolution.

This image shows the environment of the galaxy system ZS7 as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope. A zoomed-in look at the merging black hole system is inset in yellow.
Three panels are shown showing an increasingly small area of the PRIMER galaxy field. The first image shows a large field of galaxies on the black background of space. The second image shows a smaller region from this field, revealing the galaxies in closer detail, appearing in a variety of shapes and colours. The final image shows the ZS7 galaxy system, revealing the ionised hydrogen emission in orange and the doubly ionised oxygen
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Overview

  • The merging black holes were found in a galaxy system called ZS7, located over 13 billion light-years away.
  • One of the black holes is estimated to be 50 million times the mass of the Sun.
  • The discovery suggests black hole mergers are a key mechanism for rapid growth in the early universe.
  • The James Webb Space Telescope's infrared capabilities were crucial for detecting this distant event.
  • Future missions like the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) aim to measure gravitational waves from similar mergers.